[petsc-dev] Discussion about time-dependent optimization moved from PR

[Jed Brown]

Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> writes:

>   Ok, I think it plus the DMTS are problematically because, frankly,
>   only you understand them and anything in a package that has subtle
>   complexities in it that only one person understands is really bad
>   (you kind of admit this by saying you are the only one who can
>   really do a new refactorization).

I don't think it's much different from other parts of PETSc.  How many
people could jump in and refactor PCGAMG or PCFIELDSPLIT or SNESNASM or
VecScatter or DMPlex?  I think it would take any of us a few hours (or
more) of reading, understanding each use case, and sketching how a
replacement can provide each of those use cases.  This is vulnerable to
Second System Syndrome and someone to spend time making a several
thousand line patch with sweeping changes that wasn't carefully thought
out (and preferably incremental), nor would I want to review such a
beast.